The trial took place yesterday at the Supreme Court for alleged disclosure of secrets against the state attorney general, Álvaro García Ortiz, who sentenced a year and a half after the events that gave rise to a case that has affected recent Spanish politics like few others. With the oral process, citizens were able to see the case presented by its protagonists and from all points of view. García Ortiz is accused of having leaked to Cadena SER the email in which the lawyer of the entrepreneur Alberto González Amador – partner of Madrid president Isabel Díaz Ayuso – offered the Prosecutor a possible agreement in exchange for the admission of two tax crimes. The hearings, in which no evidence of the leak emerged, confirmed the doubts about the criminal qualification of the final facts and the fragility of the alleged incriminating evidence.
Even then, the controversial and torrential instructions of magistrate Ángel Hurtado did not provide any relevant data on the sequence known from day one. Nor did the Supreme Court trial provide any significant new evidence to that sequence. His interest was listening to the protagonists. Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, Ayuso’s chief of staff, admitted to having invented the theory that there was political interference against his boss’s boyfriend. González Amador explained his irritation at the idea of becoming a public figure. A half-dozen reporters confirmed they knew of the email hours or even days before the state attorney general got it into their hands and denied that he was the source of that information. He also denied it. Bitter personal disputes emerged within the prosecutor’s office. The Civil Guard recognized that the report in which it reported the responsibility of García Ortiz is a deduction based on evidence and on the temporal coincidence between some information in the possession of the State Attorney General and its publication in the media. The prosecution interprets the deletion of the prosecutor’s messages as an indication of guilt and the defense as a legitimate security measure. But no evidence has been provided against García Ortiz, who, like every citizen, enjoys the presumption of innocence. It would, therefore, be difficult to explain a conviction on the basis of a body of evidence that, subject to interpretation, does not exceed the threshold of reasonable doubt.
Based on inconsistent instructions and with a State Attorney General sitting in the dock without having resigned from his position – as advised by the guardianship of the institution he headed – this case has caused much damage to the image of Spanish justice. It is to be hoped that the temperance of the Supreme Court will prevail in the deliberations and that the magistrates will apply the utmost asepsis to their work. An element that, obviously, would not be necessary to remember if it were not for the ferocious political and media noise that accompanies this process.
It’s time for justice to move away from the screams and objectively analyze what was seen and heard. The sentence that comes out of the trial that ended yesterday is above all an opportunity. A strong sentence, which should be supported unanimously by the seven judges of the Second Chamber of the Supreme Court, must be an example of the best legal technique and respect both the presumption of innocence and reasonable doubt, keys to democratic criminal systems. And it must serve to restore trust in justice, whose credit has been tarnished for months by this case.
